Sunday, January 5, 2014

Children of God

John 1:1-18

January 5, 2014

One
of the ultimate tests of coolness in my neighborhood where I grew up was
jumping your bike across the ditch.Let
me explain.The street I grew up on was
a dead end and it encompassed a large hill.My house sat at the top of the hill, and then the street sloped gently
downward toward the dead end.One of the
houses on that downward slope was the Hall house.The Halls were an elderly couple who didn’t
seem to mind the multitude of kids in the neighborhood playing in their yard.
They had a big ditch where the yard and the street met.So jumping the ditch meant that you started
riding your bike by my house, picked up as much speed as you could, swerved
right and rode your bike into the ditch.If you did it just right you could make your bike jump as you came up
out of the ditch and swerved again into the Hall’s driveway.I have to be honest.I was a little slow in working up the courage
to jump the ditch, but once I finally did it, I was unstoppable.

That
was just one of the many things that made up the particular flavor of my
neighborhood.Think for a minute about
your neighborhoods; the ones where you grew up or the ones you live in now.Picture the people, the houses, the sounds,
the sights, the smells.Think about your
neighborhood and hear these words from Eugene Peterson’s contemporary
translation of scripture, The Message.

The Word became flesh
and blood, and moved into the neighborhood. We saw the glory with our own eyes,
the one-of-a-kind glory, like Father, like Son, Generous inside and out, true
from start to finish. John pointed him out and called, "This is the One!
The One I told you was coming after me but in fact was ahead of me. He has
always been ahead of me, has always had the first word."We all live off his generous bounty, gift
after gift after gift.[1]

“The Word became flesh and blood,
and moved into the neighborhood.”

Although I’m not always a big fan of
paraphrases of the Bible, I have to admit I am captivated by Peterson’s translation
of this verse.

“The Word became flesh and blood,
and moved into the neighborhood.”

This sentence in the Greek would
read like this.“The Word became flesh
and blood and God pitched his tent among us.”Pitching his tent or moving into the neighborhood, either way you read
it, there is a depth to these words that isn’t conveyed by the word,
“lived.”

The Word became flesh and
blood.God moved into the neighborhood
where we jumped our bikes across ditches and played endless games of Freeze Tag
and Mother May I.God moved into our
neighborhood.

Commentator Frank Thomas wrote that
Peterson’s translation makes him think about the neighborhood he grew up in; a city
neighborhood with lots of kids.A
neighborhood where they played stickball, turning the manhole covers in the
four corners of the street into bases.The Word became flesh and blood and moved into that neighborhood.

The Word became flesh and moved into
my neighborhood, Frank Thomas’s neighborhood.The Word became flesh and moved into your neighborhood.The Word became flesh and moved into affluent
neighborhoods, where the houses are big and set back from the street,
barricaded by fences and gates.The Word
became flesh and moved into the neighborhoods where no one goes out at night
for fear of being mugged or worse.The
Word became flesh and moved into the barrios and the projects and the upper
East Sides, the slums and suburbs.The
Word became flesh and bone and blood and moved into the poorest of poor
neighborhoods and the richest of the rich.The Word became flesh and moved into our neighborhood.

What is this Word that John writes
of?Is it the written word, scripture,
the summation of adjectives and nouns and verbs that make up the testaments to
God’s work in the world?Yes.But it’s even more than that.The Word or Logos is what God spoke at the
beginning of creation.When God said …
“let there be light and day and dry land.”The Word is Life. The Word is the driving force behind the very universe
itself.The Word, the Logos is not just
what we read about God, it is the very essence of God.It is far bigger than we can understand or
comprehend or describe.But think about
it.That Word became flesh and blood and
moved into our neighborhood.

While John’s prologue to his gospel
does not contain a birth narrative as we understand it – a birth narrative that
we find in Luke and Matthew – it is still a Christmas story.It is still about how God’s love, God’s self
became embodied in the flesh and blood of Jesus.God, the Word, that which called the world
into being, became flesh and moved into our neighborhood.

Why did this happen?Why did this take place?What was the point?I think the answer can be found in the
earlier verses.Jesus, Love Incarnate,
came into the world, became our neighbor so that we could become children of
God.

As we read in verse 12, “But to all
who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of
God, who were born, not of blood or the will of the flesh or of the will of
man, but of God.”

I could go into lengthy descriptions of
theological doctrines to explicate this passage; the doctrine of atonement, the doctrine of
adoption.While these are important
doctrines of the church, it seems to be that being children of God is what truly
defines us.As one commentator wrote, it
is easy to let the descriptions of ourselves become the definitions of
ourselves.We are single, we are
married.We are old, we are young.We are short, we are tall.We are strong.We are weak.We are employed or laid off or retired.But those are just descriptions.They’re not who we are, not really.Being children of God, as John explains it and as I understand it, means
that we are more than just products of biology.We are more than our circumstances.We are more than our greatest mistake, our most devastating failure, our
most exhilarating triumph.Being
children of God means that we are more than the sum of our parts.That is the grace upon grace, the gift upon
gift we are given.We are children of
God because God loved us so much that God took on the frailties and the
vulnerabilities and the weaknesses of flesh and moved into our
neighborhoods.

God came into relationship with us
so that we could be in relationship with God.So that we could be in relationship with one another.God moved into our neighborhoods so that we
might truly be neighbors.Perhaps we
should keep John’s words in mind the next time we read Luke’s story about the
Good Samaritan.Who is our
neighbor?John tells us it is God, the
Word, the Logos that pulled order out of chaos.That Word became flesh and moved into our neighborhoods, so that we
could become children.Children of
Light.Children of Love.Children of God.That is the good news of Christmas, that is the good news of Easter,
that is the good news of every day.The Word became flesh and
moved into our neighborhoods so we could become children of God.Let all of us, all of God’s children, say,
“Alleluia!”Amen.